Excerpt from Tramping on Life: An Autobiographical Narrative Now I am writing these things just as I was told them by my grandmother. For I have utterly no remembrance of my mother. Consumption ran in her family. And bearing and giving birth to me woke the inherited weakness in her. She was not even strong enough to suckle me. I was born in the early eighties, in Mornington, Ohio, in a section of that great, steel-manufacturing city which was neither city, suburb, nor country, - but a muddy, green-splashed, murky mixture of all three. They told me, when I was old enough to understand, that my mother was English, that her folks lived in Cleveland and owned a millinery and drygoods store there .. and that my father met my mother one day in Mornington. She was visiting an uncle who ran a candy store on Main Street, and, she girl-like, laughed and stood behind the counter, ready for a flirtation... My father was young, too. And he was employed there in the store, apprenticed to the candy-maker's trade. And, on this day, as he passed through, carrying a trayful of fresh-dipped chocolates, he winked at my mother and joked with her in an impudent way .. and she rebuffed him, not really meaning a rebuff, of course .. and he startled her by pulling off his hat and grotesquely showing himself to be entirely bald .. for he had grown bald very young - at the age of sixteen .. both because of scarlet fever, and because baldness for the men ran in his family .. and he was tall, and dark, and walked with rather a military carriage. I was four years old when my mother died. When she fell sick, they tell me, my grandfather did one of the few decent acts of his life - he let my father have a farm he owned in central Kansas, near Hutchinson. But my father did not try to work it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.